Quote Originally Posted by charter6 View Post
I would argue that calling "regular" warfare "regular" has always been a misnomer. Over the course of human history, what we now term irregular or asymmetric is in fact far and away the dominant form of conflict. That's a throw-away point in the context of this discussion though.

More importantly to my way of looking at things is the fact that our division of warfare into regular and irregular is itself entirely artificial and very, very modern. The idea that armies only fight armies within a limited sphere of engagement and that anything else constitutes an aberration only dates back a few centuries, and has only ever been applied selectively. Before that, the distinction between regular and irregular breaks down, and, more importantly, people didn't seem to have been thinking about warfare as being divisible in that way.
Some good stuff here.